Get to know who your audience are

This is the very first and basic step when you want to create content for your website.

Your website should have a specific audience, and you have to get very precise in defining that audience group.

Going too wide will not help you serve the purpose.

You have to really zero in on your ideal, target audience.

Why is this so important? It is highly crucial because without knowing your target audience you cannot serve them.

Your business is for people, right? You cannot create stuff and sell to Google or any other search engines.

You need people to do really business with you.

And you just cannot sell to people out of the blue. You need to serve them first. You need to show them how useful your business or product can be to them.

You need to demonstrate how your business or a particular product of yours can solve a pressing problem your audience is having (more on this below).

In order to make your website useful to them, you need to deliver content that your audience will appreciate.

Your website should have content that is useful for your audience.

It is the first step in making that long lasting connection between your business and your audience.

It can be an annoying exercise to perform - having to figure out who your audience are. But once you get clarity about your business it will be a piece of cake.

If you clearly know what your business is going to be, you can also clearly pin point who your audience will be!

So don’t jump into publishing blog posts or start with product creation without accomplishing this step.

Identify your audiences’ challenges and pain points

Everyone has some kind of a challenge - in life, business, relationship whatever. Also problems and pain points are not rare too.

Problems and challenges are quite common in any field.

You just have to identify them in order to either solve them or help people with it.

Any business that focuses on solving a problem is guaranteed to win.

Your content should therefore focus solely on being useful to your target audience.

For this to happen you have to be aware of the challenges faced by your audience.

Finding this is also not challenging! You have to listen to them. Hang out in places where they hang out.

Is it Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram or something else? You have to make sure you hang out in those places too.

Monitor the social media updates. Quora is a great place to listen to your audience!

People ask so many questions there.

If you properly search for your keywords and stay tuned to a few topics, you can identify a lot of questions being asked.

Each question is a potential opportunity to serve your audience.

Gather the bits and pieces from the questions in Quora and collect them in ONE place - say a spreadsheet.

Your content marketing plan is ALMOST ready

Now that you know your target audience and their pain points your content marketing plan is almost ready.

Why “almost”?

Because you still need to create that content. Even though you clearly know who your audience are and what their problems are, you still need to create content in order to serve them.

Content creation comprises of three major steps:

Identifying content categories

Brainstorming for blog post ideas

Actually writing those blog posts in a format that will be well received by your audience and will do well in search engines.

(Optional) Fix on your content budget

Let’s break down the steps.

Identifying your content categories

Your site’s content need to be organised. This is good both for SEO and for reader friendliness. Don’t go overboard with categories.

The sweet spot is 5-8 categories. Choose them well. Create content that fall into any of those categories. Don’t go wide over that.

If you do this consistently it will be much easier for both search engines and your audience to make the most out of your content.

It will be also much easier for you to stay on track if you have your categories are well defined and aligned with your blogging/business goals.

Brainstorming for blog post ideas

Most bloggers struggle with content creation and don’t have a wining content marketing plan merely because they cannot come up with blog post ideas.

In order to stay ahead of the content creation game, you need to be consistently publishing useful content and the first step to get that done (after you have followed the steps on creating that marketing plan as discussed above) is to come up with blog post ideas.

Brainstorming is the word and you should be doing a lot of it. In a consistent manner.

You must keep yourself updated with the happenings in your industry and what your competitors are after. Keep tabs of the popular blogs in your niche.

The more you read the more inspiration you will get for blog post ideas.

Creating killer content

Yes, actually writing those blog posts is the most challenging bit. You have to make time for it.

And you cannot just create any content - the content has to be top notch in order to get noticed.

Remember there are millions of blogs out there and you should give your readers a reason to stick with yours.

Sound kinda big isn’t? Don’t worry, it is not as complicated as it sounds.

I have created a course specifically to help you with content creation. You can check it out here.

Fix your content budget

The last step. And this is optional - applies to you only if you plan to outsource content creation.

If you prefer to create all the content by yourself, you can skip this step altogether.

Whether you should write the content yourself or have it outsourced depends on various factors.

It depends on how many websites you manage and how much time you can allocate in a week for blogging related activities (this again depends on whether you are blogging full time or part time).

If you clearly know you alone can’t manage with content creation, outsource it by all means.

But you have to make sure you fix the content budget and go by it. You cannot spend money on content blindly without knowing how much of it pays off.

Devise your content marketing strategy now!

Without a content plan your online business will not shine. I know that’s a bitter truth that is too hard to accept.

So get to work. It is not as hard as you think!

Jane shares cutting-edge, practical blogging tips at her blog Savvy Blogging Tips. If you want to get a head start with blogging or want guidance to make progress, check out the FREE resource at this page.